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Anthony Trollope: an Irish writer

Writing the Frontier: Anthony
Trollope between Britain and Ireland

By John McCourt

Nathaniel Hawthorne famously
commented that Anthony Trollope’s quintessentially English novels were written
on the “strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale … these books are
just as English as a beef-steak.” In like mode, Irish critic Stephen Gwynn said
Trollope was “as English as John Bull.” But unlike the other great Victorian
English writers, Trollope became Trollope by leaving his homeland and making
his life across the water in Ireland, and achieving there his first successes
there in both his post office and his literary careers. Feeling, at 26, that he
was in a dead-end as a post office clerk in London and having as yet failed to
actually finish a work of fiction, Trollope believed he had little to lose in
accepting a posting that nobody else wanted in the remote County Offaly town of
Banagher. Over the following 15 years he would get to know the whole of the
island, living in working in Clonmel, Mallow, Cork, Belfast, and Dublin. Once
in Ireland, however, he was a man transformed and hardly off the boat, he began
to apply himself to his twin trades with great industry. His own words about
one of his political heroes, Lord Palmerston, perfectly fit Trollope himself
from this time on: “Hard work was to him the first necessity of his existence.”

It was in Ireland that his
mighty literary talent finally began to emerge. Even if most of his greatest
novels are undeniably English in setting and theme, and are dominated by
English characters, his early works were Irish and he would return to Irish
subject matter sporadically, if with mixed success, throughout his long career.
His Irish writings constitute both a vital and distinct group of works, add
significantly to our overall vision of the writer, and represent a rich and
underestimated contribution to the canon of the nineteenth century Irish novel
tout court, complicating the sometimes arbitrary divisions that are drawn
between the English and the Irish traditions. Trollope felt that he was in a
unique position as a cultural mediator between Ireland and England, with both
the advantages of living for so long in Ireland and the moral obligations that
this sojourn imposed upon him. And so he attempted, times over, to give
narrative shape to the complexities of a
country whose voice – feeble in Famine-dominated mid-century – was none too
willingly heard in Britain.

While it is true that in
Ireland, as the early twentieth century scholar John Sadleir put it, Trollope
became “an ambassador of England, living in disputatious amity with one of the
most race-conscious nations in the world,” he equally became an envoy of his
second country, Ireland. Side by side with our appreciation of Trollope as an acclaimed English novelist, we
need to take stock of Trollope as an honorary Irish writer of considerable
achievement, one who never shied away from the great and sometimes terrible
issues, such as land agitation, Home Rule, starvation and Famine that affected
the country at all social levels during and after his long sojourn there. It is chiefly in his Irish novels that a
lesser-known, more unconventional Trollope emerges, a conflicted and sometimes
almost subversive figure caught between his ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’
opinions as he vacillated between endorsing standard English views about
Ireland and offering his own alternative, sometimes awkward, counter readings.
By accident rather than design he became a border crosser, one who would have
to accept that, following his initiation as a successful public servant and writer
in Ireland, he would always be betwixt and between, caught by sometimes
conflicting loyalties to both cultures. This would prove to be a creatively
productive situation for Trollope even if he would gradually rein in his
sympathy for the Irish point of view and retreat to a more defensive ‘English’
position.

But his Irish literary
‘journey’, one that his publishers advised him against, is one that readers would do well to follow
him on today, beginning with the tragic The Macdermots of Ballycoran (1847),
which offers a penetrating discussion of the causes of Irish rural agitation,
and the far more optimistic and comic The Kellys and the O’Kellys (1848), a
valuable prototype for some of Trollope’s later (and greater) marriage plot
novels. Worthy of attention, even if its politics is at best questionable, is
Trollope’s often deeply moving Famine novel, Castle Richmond (1860) along with
the second and fourth Palliser novels, Phineas Finn; The Irish Member (1869)
and Phineas Redux (1874), which have as their hero the Irishman, Phineas Finn,
struggling to make his way in the English political world and caught between
the contrasting pulls of possible marriage in Ireland and England.

The entire series challenges
Irish stereotypes and meditates on two of the most common images of Irishness,
that of the Stage Irishman and that of Ireland as a feminized victim. His final
two Irish novels, the admonitory An Eye for an Eye (1879) and his posthumous
and problematic The Landleaguers, deserve to take its place among the series of
courageous if flawed attempts to contain the matter of Ireland in novelistic
form and serve, in the darkening last decades of the nineteenth century, as a
warning to his English readers that to fail to take Irish problems seriously
will inevitably result in instability, insurrection, and violence which might
well spill across the Irish Sea.

John McCourt was born and
educated in Dublin. He has lived and worked in Italy for over twenty years. He
has published widely in the field of Irish Studies, focussing on both
nineteenth and twentieth century literature. John is currently an associate
Professor of English at Università Roma Tre. He holds a Ph.D. from the National
University of Ireland (University College Dublin) and is a specialist in Joyce
Studies and in nineteenth and twentieth century Irish literature. The
co-founder of the Trieste Joyce School (1997), he is widely published and best
known for The Years of Bloom: Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920, (University of
Wisconsin Press/Lilliput Press). He is the author of Writing the Frontier:
Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland (OUP, 2015).

"The English language brings out the best in the Irish. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter. They hurl it at the sky like a paint pot full of rainbows, and then make it chant a dirge for man's fate and man's follies that is as mournful as misty spring rain crying over the fallow earth." T E Kalem - On Brendan Behan's 1958 play Borstal Boy, quoted in a Time advertisement, NY Times 17 Mar 79

He was born an Englishman and remained one for years. The Hostage

Algernon.
Good Heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that?

Lane.I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.

The Importance of being Earnest

It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz, which is a very interesting old place. Being practically on the frontier--for the Borgo Pass leads from it into Bukovina--it has had a very stormy existence, and it certainly shows marks of it. Fifty years ago a series of great fires took place, which made terrible havoc on five separate occasions. At the very beginning of the seventeenth century it underwent a siege of three weeks and lost 13,000 people, the casualties of war proper being assisted by famine and disease. Dracula

"Shut your yelling, for if you're after making a mighty man of me this day by the power of a lie, you're setting me now to think if it's a poor thing to be lonesome, it's worse maybe to go mixing with the fools of earth. The Playboy of the Western World

An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be 'agreeable to strangers', like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets. Larry Doyle toTom Broadbent. John Bull's Other Island, act1.

My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire: I was the third of five sons. He sent me to Emanuel College in Cambridge at fourteen years old, where I resided three years, and applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of maintaining me, although I had a very scanty allowance, being too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, an eminent surgeon in London, with whom I continued four years. My father now and then sending me small sums of money, I laid them out in learning navigation, and other parts of the mathematics, useful to those who intend to travel, as I always believed it would be, some time or other, my fortune to do. When I left Mr. Bates, I went down to my father: where, by the assistance of him and my uncle John, and some other relations, I got forty pounds,and a promise of thirty pounds a year to maintain me at Leyden: there I studied physic two years and seven months, knowing it would be useful in long voyages. Gullivers Travels

Irish Lit

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